Spotify Playlist: Latex Condo

The Breeders - All Nerve

The Breeders are not a band burdened by the idea of a legacy. All Nerve comes ten years after the middling Mountain Battles and is just the band's fifth album in 28 years. It also makes this lineup - the same that recorded 1993's Last Splash - the first to record more than one album (although, including The Amps, everyone involved has appeared in at least one other iteration). Last Splash was commercially successful in large part due to a confluence of factors such as how "Cannonball" fit in perfectly with MTV's alt-rock agenda at the time and British label 4AD doubling down on its decision to sign American artists, but it endures because of Kim Deal's songwriting and the band's musicianship. 25 years later, there's still so much to unpack in "Cannonball", not to mention the sublime power-pop of "Divine Hammer", the batshit dirge "Mad Lucas" and the alternately boiling and simmering "Roi" and its brief reprise, the latter ingeniously placed at the end of the album after a cover of Ed's Redeeming Qualities' country & western song "Drivin' on 9". But for all that, All Nerve is no attempt to replicate past glory.

Free from expectations and historical context, All Nerve is free to take its time. Opening track "Nervous Mary" uses the same slow-fast structure as Last Splash's opener "New Year", and could have been recorded the day after that album's last session, but the album soon carves out its own identity and indulges in slower tempos more than any other Breeders album, never more so than "Dawn: Making An Effort", which creates a wall of noise out of delayed guitar and cymbal splashes. Josephine Wiggs' bass is prominent without being overbearing, and supplies an intangible, nervous energy, but her standout performance is on "MetaGoth", which puts her in front of the mic and pairs her on guitar with Kelley Deal. Co-written by Wiggs and Kim Deal, it recalls Deal's Pixies contribution "Into the White" in tone, but transplanted into darker, plodding Breeders territory and replete with ominous guitar figures. Wiggs' untarnished English accent and deadpan delivery only amplify the effect. A cover of Krautrockers Amon Düül II's  "Archangel's Thunderbird" keeps the album's back half from slipping from languid to sonorous, and is perhaps the highlight for Jim MacPherson, whose raw, spirited drumming has truly been missed. In fact the interplay between these four musicians has been missed, and it's easy to point to them collectively as the proximate cause for All Nerve being the most vital Breeders album in 25 years.

Parquet Courts - Wide Awake!

A Parquet Courts album produced by Danger Mouse is a no-brainer on paper - the pairing of a band not content to release the same album twice and a producer who's a popular choice for artists looking to switch up their sound. The good news is that Wide Awake! is a triumph in practice. The album revels in previously untapped influences that the band leans into to the point where if, say, "Violence" was the first Parquet Courts song you ever heard, you might well assume that these four white guys were always this indebted to black artists of the past. That one is a rumination on numbness to violence as an unfortunate but necessary response to its prevalence in present day America. Andrew Savage sounds like James Murphy after 12 cups of coffee, while musically it recalls Funkadelic, both in its specifics (especially the pitch-shifted monologue in the final stretch) and the way it makes an inherently bitter pill palatable. Unfortunately the Talking Heads pastiche title track is a bridge too far, which is odd considering how well they sell the almost Jackson 5 bounce of "Tenderness". The idea of weighty themes appealingly packaged is not new to Parquet Courts, but with their most eclectic set of tunes and broadest emotional palette, Wake Up! is the band's most engaging album.

Queens of the Stone Age - Villains

Queens of the Stone Age have carved out a comfortable position as elder statesmen of rock. Nobody expects them to flip their sound on its head at every turn. They could, if they wanted, give it just enough of a  perfunctory tweak to avoid being accused of repeating themselves, but of course they don't want to do that. Josh Homme is a songwriter's songwriter, always seeking new approaches even after having worked within his idiom with one band or another for nearly 30 years. The knee-jerk reaction is to call Villains QOTSA's pop album, given that Mark Ronson is producer, but if that's the case, they've arrived at it on their own terms. The album is full of the serpentine twists that have become the band's stock in trade, and the more floor-ready beats recontextualise familiar QOTSA tropes without compromising the muscularity of Homme's riffs. The result is less "Uptown Funk" than decadent disco. Villains forgoes the band's tradition of inviting high profile guests, which is not a decision that the first and so far only band to unite Trent Reznor and Elton John in the studio would make lightly. It shows they don't need a lot of help to pull off stylistic shifts such as this one - not that there's any reason to doubt it.

Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn - Echo in the Valley

Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn's personal r elationship goes back a decade and their professional relationship almost as far, but they hadn't recorded as a duo until 2014's self-titled album. Strictly a dual banjo and voice affair, it was more a showcase of their musical interplay than songwriting as they navigated how to work in that context, and it settled the question of whether Washburn, an excellent banjoist and Fleck, a virtuoso, could work as a duo. That's not to diminish its value as a fine collection of songs, but the point was occasionally a bit laboured - I personally didn't need a four and a half minute rendition of "Railroad" ("I've been working on the railroad...)".

Echo in the Valley builds on what the duo learnt the first time around and brings their songwriting to the fore. The first time around, Fleck and Washburn both wrote the bulk of the album, but did so separately on all but two songs; on Echo in the Valley, it's a collaborative effort all over. There's less reliance on both traditional material and traditional influences in general, but the album evokes a bygone era in less tangible ways.

RIP Grant Hart

RIP Grantzberg Vernon Hart

March 18, 1961 - September 14, 2017

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RIP Holger Czukay

RIP Holger Czukay

24 March 1938 - 5 September 2017

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RIP Jaki Liebezeit

Happy Possibly 100th Birthday, John Lee Hooker!

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Slowdive - Slowdive

So there's a new Slowdive album in 2017; it almost seems too pure for this sinful Earth, but I'll take it.

Of course, you don't want a Slowdive album compromised by two decades of cynicism and the world generally going down the shitter, so it comes as a relief that Slowdive, though recorded last year, could have been from 1994, a missing link between Souvlaki and Pygmalion, perfectly preserved in amber and discovered just when we need it most. Slowdive shouldn't be penalised for sticking to what works, because it does work; there hasn't been a time between their formation and now when their simple yet layered and meticulous compositions wouldn't have seamlessly blended into the musical landscape aesthetically while standing out in quality. Though it's no mere nostalgia trip, Slowdive nonetheless serves as a reminder of a time when there was assumed to be preordained limits on human ego, hubris and stupidity - that if we weren't already as low as we could go, we'd at least know when we got there. It's the album we need right now, even if it's not the one we deserve.

Benjamin Booker - Witness

A recently posted Instagram photo of Benjamin Booker from Christmas 2005 shows Booker with a Stratocaster. "My first Fender! White for Jimi and Kurt. Smashed on stage at Lollapalooza in the summer of 2014." Booker believes music is eternal, but instruments are ephemeral. That, or he just likes smashing shit. In any case, Booker embodies Cobain's punk spirit while being a student of classic rock, soul and blues. The sound of his debut could be compared to that of Chuck Berry fronting Nirvana, although his voice defies easy comparison. On Witness, Booker tempers the garage-punk sound on which he built his name, favouring those older influences, especially on the gospel-infused title track.

On his debut, Booker sang that "the future is slow coming", which recalled "A Change is Gonna Come" by Sam Cooke (who is evoked on Witness in the string intro to "Believe"). He wasn't contradicting Cooke's message, but adding "it's gonna take longer than we thought". Booker is the change he wishes to see in the world, and Witness is the sound of him settling in for the long haul.

RIP Chris Cornell

RIP Chris Cornell
July 20, 1964 - May 18, 2017

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Spoon - Hot Thoughts

A band that released its first album in 1996 shouldn't sound this vital in 2017. Hell, not in 2007. Having got this far with only one genuine aberration (2010's Transference), Spoon has earned the right not to be expected to still deliver era-defining albums and only needs to vary its sound just enough to avoid staleness.

Hot Thoughts incorporates synth elements that have existed in the Spooniverse (I'll see myself out) since Britt Daniel and Dan Boeckner's Divine Fits, but wisely doesn't mess with what's always worked about Spoon. Spoon's best songs are low key and moving in an esoteric way. "I Ain't the One" carries on this tradition with its simple keyboard chord sequence and swirling synth. Likewise, the centrepiece and the closing track, which are of a piece: "Pink Up", a slowly building composition of keys and thick percussion and "Us", a meditative brass jam on the former and a great finish to an album that consistently delivers and occasionally surprises.

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RIP Chuck Berry

RIP Chuck Berry

October 18, 1926 - March 18, 2017

Happy Birthday to the Following Albums (4)

Happy 5th Birthday, Lower Dens' Nootropics

Happy 10th Birthday, Battles' Mirrored

Happy 20th Birthday, Radiohead's OK Computer

Happy 25th Birthday, Tori Amos's Little Earthquakes

Happy 30th Birthday, Depeche Mode's Music for the Masses

Happy 40th Birthday, Television's Marquee Moon

Happy 50th Birthday, The Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground & Nico

2017 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Nominees: My Votes

Honourable mentions: